Abstract
The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has entered regulatory agendas in shipping. In Norway, a debate has been ongoing for over a decade about whether liquefied natural gas (LNG) ship fuel enables or impedes the transition to a greener future for shipping. This paper explores the assembling of ship fuel before and after the introduction of a controversial carbon tax on LNG. It reconstructs how changes in the regulatory apparatus prompted the reworking of natural gas into a ship fuel, yet later slowed down the development of LNG in a strategy to promote alternative zero-emission fuels such as hydrogen. Following ship fuel as socio-materiality in motion, we find that fossil fuels are reworked into new modes of application as part of transition policies. Natural gas continues to be enacted as an “enabler of transition” in the context of shipping, given that current government policies work to support the production of hydrogen from natural gas and carbon capture and storage (CCS). New modes of accounting for emissions reassemble existing fossil fuel materiality by means of CCS and fossil-based zero-emission fuels. We examine retrofit as a particular kind of reassembling and as a prism for studying the politics of fuel and the relation between transitions and existing infrastructures.
Highlights
Ships are among the largest machines on the planet and transport most of the traded goods [1]
We focused on the framings and reassembling of nat ural gas as ship fuel, following natural gas in debates over liquefied natural gas (LNG) ship fuel into newer debates over blue hydrogen
Based on the mate rials that inform this case study, we identify two regulatory changes that became key to the reassembling of ship fuel: (1) how LNG ship fuel emerged as an alternative fuel and subsequently a ship fuel, and (2) the subsequent regulatory changes that subjected LNG ship fuel to a carbon tax, motivated by the ambition to stimulate the use of other alternative zero-emission fuels including hydrogen
Summary
Ships are among the largest machines on the planet and transport most of the traded goods [1]. The same IPCC report states that large portions of the existing fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground if climate policy targets are to be achieved, which has become a core argument of climate activists and NGOs, giving rise to the “carbon budget” as an alternative mode of calculation [19,20] This duality, where the object fossil fuels is framed as both an enabler of transition and the very thing we are transitioning away from, can be found in transition research: Goodman and Marshall [23] draw a line between initiating energy decarbonisation and advancing the fossil fuel sector, and Loorbach et al [11] write that even though a sustainable society requires changes that go beyond improvement of the existing, present policies often fail to address the underlying structure of problems. This paper ex amines the negotiations over pathways to a greener future and follows fossil fuels through policies towards green transitions in marine shipping
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